Acing the GMAT reading comprehension section

One of the more challenging parts of the GMAT for business school applicants is the reading comprehension section. Excerpts are often overly dense and full of information that you won’t necessarily need to answer the questions that follow. A lot of applicants make the mistake of thinking that they can just jump ahead, read the questions and look for the answers in the passage. Unfortunately, this isn’t the right strategy (and will actually end up slowing you down).

Here’s the best strategy for acing the GMAT reading comprehension section:

Read the entire passage. You need to have a general understanding of the passage in order to answer the questions asked. Some of the questions will be paragraph specific but a lot of the questions will also ask about overarching themes. If you do not read the whole passage, then answering question accurately will be difficult.

At the end of each paragraph, write a one or two line summary as a reference. It may sound unnecessary but doing so will keep you from having to reread the paragraph when answering questions. You should also highlight, underline or jot down the key words from the paragraph.

After reading the passage, go through all of the questions and their answers. While doing so, cross out answers that you know are unrelated to the passage or are the least likely to be correct. In the process, you may answer some of the questions. When revisiting the questions that you did not answer right away, you will have eliminated the least likely answers, improving the odds of selecting the right answer.

Bottom line: invest the time in reading entire passages, take notes while doing so, then going through questions and eliminating likely wrong answers.